Many CRO freelancers will tell you what you want to hear. Here is how to find one who will tell you what you NEED to hear, and deliver results that last.
The conversion rate optimisation software market was projected to reach around $1.7 billion in 2025, with the broader CRO services industry growing at a compound annual rate north of 10%. Businesses are waking up to the fact that acquiring traffic is only half the challenge. Converting that traffic into meaningful action is where the real leverage sits.
This growth has attracted a wave of talented practitioners into the market. There are genuinely brilliant CRO freelancers and consultants working today, people with deep expertise, rigorous methodology, and a real commitment to doing good work. The discipline has matured enormously over the past decade, and the best practitioners are producing work that is more sophisticated and more effective than ever.
The challenge is not that good freelancers do not exist. It is that the barrier to entry is low, and the terminology is easy to borrow. Alongside the excellent practitioners, there are those who treat the discipline as a bag of tricks: slap a countdown timer on the page, change the button colour, add some urgency copy and call it a day. That is manipulation dressed in a lab coat, shilling snake oil pretending its science. And it produces results that are fragile at best and actively corrosive to your brand at worst.
If you are looking for a CRO freelancer who will actually improve your business for the long term, you need to know how to distinguish genuine experts from the surface-level operators. Here is what to look for, what to avoid, and what questions to ask before you commit.
The first thing most people ask a CRO freelancer is "what results have you achieved?" which feels like an obvious question. It is also the wrong one to lead with.
Results without methodology are meaningless. Anyone can (and does) cherry-pick winning tests and present an impressive uplift number. What matters is how they got there. A competent CRO freelancer should be able to walk you through their process from end to end: how they conduct research, how they prioritise opportunities, how they form hypotheses, how they design and run experiments, and critically, how they handle tests that do not win.
This last point matters more than you might think. Industry data consistently suggests that somewhere between 60% and 90% of A/B tests produce no statistically significant positive result. Speero's analysis of over 28,000 experiments found that only around one in three tests delivers a clear positive outcome. A freelancer who claims an implausibly high win rate is either running trivial tests, misreading their statistics, or not being straight with you. The best CRO practitioners learn as much from their losing tests as their winners. They build institutional knowledge over time and use it to make each subsequent experiment more informed.
Ask about their research methods specifically. Do they use qualitative and quantitative research? Can they explain the difference between a heuristic evaluation, a usability study, and data analysis? Do they triangulate findings from analytics, user behaviour tools, and direct user feedback before forming hypotheses? Or do they jump straight to "best practices" and hope for the best?
A freelancer who relies entirely on best practices without conducting original research on your specific users is not doing CRO. They are guessing.
CRO is fundamentally a statistical discipline. If your freelancer cannot explain basic concepts like statistical significance, sample size calculations, and the difference between frequentist and Bayesian approaches to testing, that should concern you.
You do not need to become a statistician yourself. But you do need a freelancer who respects the numbers. The CRO industry has a well-documented problem with what you may have heard of as "p-hacking": stopping tests early when results look favourable, running multiple variations without adjusting for multiplicity, or declaring winners based on insufficient sample sizes. These practices produce false positives that look impressive in a report but evaporate the moment you implement them permanently. Good practitioners know this and guard against it. Less experienced ones may not even realise they are doing it.
Ask your prospective freelancer how they determine when a test has reached a valid conclusion. Ask them what minimum detectable effect they typically design for and why. Ask them how they handle tests that show a small positive trend but have not reached significance. The answers will tell you whether they are a rigorous practitioner or someone who still has some learning to do.
A good CRO freelancer will also be honest about the limitations of testing. Not every website has sufficient traffic to run meaningful A/B tests. If your site receives fewer than around 30,000 unique visitors per month, a credible freelancer should be upfront about the constraints this places on experimentation velocity. If they promise rapid, dramatic results regardless of your traffic levels, treat that as a warning sign. To be clear, that isn't a "you can't test" threshold, it's just that shouldn't expect to be running AB tests on headlines and button placement that concludes in a fortnight. Tests will need have more dramatic effects and run for longer to be accurately measurable.
CRO sits at the intersection of several disciplines: analytics, UX research, psychology, copywriting, design, and front-end development. The best freelancers have deep expertise in at least one of these areas and working knowledge of the rest. This T-shaped profile is what separates a capable optimisation practitioner from someone who has simply learned the vocabulary.
This matters because genuine optimisation is not a single-skill activity. Understanding that a checkout flow has a drop-off problem requires analytics. Understanding why users are dropping off requires research. Designing a solution requires UX and design thinking. Implementing the experiment requires technical capability. Interpreting the results requires statistical literacy. And communicating findings to stakeholders requires clear thinking and plain language.
Many excellent CRO practitioners have built their careers from a specific starting point, perhaps analytics, or UX research, or front-end development, and expanded outward from there. That is perfectly healthy. What you want to avoid is someone who has remained entirely siloed: a pure strategist with no technical understanding, or a pure technician with no strategic perspective. The most effective CRO practitioners can move fluidly between research, strategy, and implementation. They understand the entire chain from data to insight to hypothesis to experiment to learning.
Ask about their technical capabilities. Can they build experiments in your testing platform? Do they understand HTML, CSS, and JavaScript well enough to implement changes or at least to review implementation quality? Do they know how to configure analytics correctly and validate that tracking is reliable? A freelancer who depends entirely on your development team for every implementation detail will move slowly and may introduce errors that compromise test validity.
It wouldn't be an AWIP article if I didn't menion this. This is where a lot of advice about hiring CRO freelancers falls short. Not enough people are talking about ethics, and that is a mistake.
The International Consumer Protection and Enforcement Network (ICPEN) reviewed websites and apps in 2024 and found that over 76% used at least one dark pattern, with nearly 67% deploying multiple manipulative design techniques. These are not fringe practices. They are widespread across the web. I see LinkedIn posts from practicioners suggesting you should try them on your website to win big. And while many CRO practitioners steer well clear of them, others actively recommend them because they produce short-term metric improvements.
Countdown timers, tied to nothing, that reset when the page refreshes. "Only 2 left in stock" messages generated regardless of actual inventory. Confirm-shaming copy that mocks users for declining an offer. Pre-checked consent boxes. Subscription flows designed to be easy to start and impossible to cancel. These techniques "work" in the narrowest sense: they increase the number of people who click a button or complete a form. But research from Luguri and Strahilevitz published in the Journal of Legal Analysis demonstrated that aggressive dark patterns nearly quadrupled conversion rates while simultaneously generating powerful consumer backlash. You are borrowing from future trust to inflate today's numbers.
The regulatory environment is catching up. The EU Digital Services Act, updated FTC guidelines, and the GDPR's provisions against deceptive design are creating real legal risk for businesses that rely on manipulative tactics. A CRO freelancer who recommends dark patterns is a compliance liability, even if they "win" today.
Ask your prospective freelancer directly: what is their position on dark patterns? How do they define the line between persuasion and manipulation? Can they give you examples of techniques they have declined to implement for clients? The best practitioners in the industry have already thought carefully about this. They will have clear, considered answers. If someone has never reflected on the ethics of their work, that tells you something about the depth of their practice.
There is a structural incentive problem in parts of the CRO market. Some freelancers and agencies benefit from keeping you dependent on their services indefinitely. If they build systems and processes that only they understand, or if they hoard knowledge rather than transferring it, you are locked in. The moment they leave, your optimisation capability leaves with them.
The best CRO freelancers actively work to make themselves less necessary over time. They document their processes, train your team, build internal capability, and create systems that your organisation can maintain independently. The goal of a CRO engagement should not be permanent dependency. It should be a transfer of capability that leaves your business stronger than it was before.
This is an uncomfortable reality for any freelancer, because it means engineering their own obsolescence. But many of the best practitioners embrace this model precisely because it produces better long-term outcomes for clients, and because it builds the kind of reputation that generates referrals. An organisation that understands CRO principles, has documented processes, and can run its own experiments will always outperform one that relies entirely on external help.
Ask your freelancer what their exit strategy looks like. How will they ensure your team can continue the work when the engagement ends? What documentation and training will they provide? If they look uncomfortable with the question, that tells you something important about their business model. If they light up, you have probably found someone who takes capability building seriously.
The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer found that 80% of people trust the brands they use, placing brand trust ahead of trust in business, media, government, and NGOs. Trust is now considered equal to price and quality as a purchase consideration. This has direct implications for how you approach CRO.
Every optimisation decision you make either builds or erodes the trust your users have in your brand. A freelancer who focuses exclusively on short-term conversion metrics without considering the trust implications of their recommendations is optimising for the wrong thing. The metric that matters most is the lifetime relationship between your brand and the people who interact with it. Put plainly, we're in the business of making friends, as well as making money.
Businesses that build genuine trust with their users see higher repeat purchase rates, stronger word-of-mouth referral, lower customer acquisition costs, and greater resilience when things go wrong. The Edelman data shows that 87% of consumers will pay more for brands they trust. Optimisation that erodes trust to inflate a single metric is actively destroying long-term value.
Look for a freelancer who can articulate how their work connects to broader business outcomes beyond the immediate test result. Do they think about customer lifetime value? Do they consider how an experiment might affect brand perception? Do they balance short-term conversion improvements against long-term user experience? These are the questions that separate a tactician from a strategist.
CRO freelancers will often lead with their tool stack: which testing platform they prefer, which analytics suite they use, which heatmap tool they recommend. This information is useful but secondary. The tools are a means to an end. What matters is whether the freelancer can think clearly about your specific problems and apply the right methods to solve them.
That said, some tool literacy is non-negotiable. Your freelancer should be fluent in at least one testing platform such as Optimizely, Webtrends Optimize, Growthbook or Convert. They should understand Google Analytics thoroughly and ideally have experience with additional analytics tools. They should know how to use session recording and heatmap tools responsibly, with proper attention to data privacy and user consent. Are they providing deep and considered answers to your website and user problems, or are they just asking a large language model for ideas and pasting that into an email?
The "responsibly" part matters. Session recording tools can capture sensitive user data if not configured correctly. Heatmap and analytics tools can fall foul of GDPR requirements if consent mechanisms are inadequate. A freelancer who recommends deploying these tools without discussing privacy implications is cutting corners that could cost you. A person acting as a glorified interface between you and an AI is just wasting your time and money.
Pay attention to whether your freelancer treats tools as a crutch or a complement to their thinking. Someone who immediately reaches for a heatmap before understanding the business context and reviewing existing data is working backwards. The best CRO practitioners start with questions, not tools.
Over 15 years in this industry, certain warning signs have become reliable indicators that a CRO engagement may not go well. If a freelancer guarantees specific conversion rate improvements before seeing your data, be cautious. CRO outcomes depend on too many variables for anyone to make credible guarantees. If they claim a near-perfect win rate on their tests, their methodology may be suspect. If they cannot explain their process without resorting to jargon, they may not understand it well enough themselves.
Be cautious of freelancers who focus exclusively on landing pages or checkout flows without considering the full user journey. Optimisation does not happen in isolation. A change to your checkout experience affects everything upstream and downstream. A good freelancer thinks systemically, not in fragments.
Be equally cautious of freelancers who dismiss qualitative research. Numbers tell you what is happening. Only people can tell you why. A CRO practice built entirely on quantitative data will miss the human context that drives the most meaningful improvements. User interviews, usability testing, and open-ended survey responses provide insights that no amount of click data can replicate.
Finally, pay attention to how a freelancer talks about your users. The language they use reveals their fundamental orientation. If they talk about "reducing friction" and "removing barriers," that is healthy. If they talk about "getting users to" do things or "making them" convert, that is a worldview that treats people as problems to be solved rather than partners in a transaction. The best practitioners in the industry talk about users with respect and curiosity, not as marks to be manipulated.
The ideal CRO freelancer combines several qualities that are individually common but rarely found together. They are analytically rigorous but empathetic. Technically capable but strategically minded. Confident in their expertise but honest about uncertainty. Commercially focused but ethically grounded.
They will challenge your assumptions respectfully. They will tell you when an idea will not work and explain why. They will design experiments that produce genuine learning regardless of whether they win or lose. They will think about your users as people with needs and frustrations, not as data points to be nudged. And they will leave your organisation more capable than they found it.
The CRO market has matured significantly, and there are more genuinely excellent practitioners working today than at any point in the discipline's history. The challenge is not so much finding talent but it is navagating the noise and finding the right fit for your specific needs, values, and stage of growth. Take the time to ask the right questions, look beyond surface-level credentials, and choose someone whose approach aligns with both your commercial objectives and your values.
Your website exists to serve your users. The person you hire to optimise it should believe that too.
At Another Web is Possible, we practice CRO the way we believe it should be done: grounded in research, rigorous in methodology, and built on the principle that optimisation should serve users, not exploit them. With over 15 years of experience leading experimentation programmes for brands including The Donkey Sanctuary, Parkdean Resorts, AllSaints, and Krispy Kreme, we bring senior-level strategic thinking without the agency overhead or the ethical compromises.
We work on flexible engagement models designed to build your internal capability, not your dependency on us. If you are looking for a CRO partner who will be honest with you about what works, what does not, and why it matters, get in touch.
Future Market Insights: Conversion Rate Optimization Software Market (2025)
OECD: Six dark patterns used to manipulate you when shopping online (2024)
Luguri and Strahilevitz: Shining a Light on Dark Patterns, Journal of Legal Analysis (2021)
Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report: Brand Trust, From We to Me (2025)
Invesp: How Much Does CRO Cost? Complete Agency and Freelancer Pricing Breakdown (2025)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
(8).png)
(10).png)
(9).png)
(6).png)
(5).png)
(4).png)
(3).png)
(2).png)
(1).png)
.png)
.png)
(7).png)
.png)
